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Prologue
Apsychotic break is defined as someone losing touch with reality and experiencing delusions or hallucinations.
I would argue that we all need a break from reality once in a while. Apparently, my doctors disagree. And so does my husband.
Husband. The word sounds foreign to me. Especially when the title comes with a man I don’t remember. He tells me it was love at first sight and that we married soon after meeting because we couldn’t imagine life without each other. Then something happened, and I went missing for a couple of days. My husband searched for me high and low, eventually finding me asleep on the doorstep ofBasilica Santa Mariaand completely delusional.
I was screaming about being taken by the mafia to repay an old family debt and that I had escaped. According to them, it was all a figment of my imagination. Emiliano Calvano was a real person, but one I must have seen on TV or read about in the papers and pulled into my delusions. My beloved pet, Rooster, died a few months ago back in America. And my sisters? Estranged for nearly a year, torn apart by our mother’s death.
Everything I thought I knew to be real was a phantasm, illusions of a broken mind…
At least, that’s what they tell me.
1
Greta
“How are the daily exercises going? Are you feeling more focused?” Doctor Meyer, my psychiatrist, asks like she does every time I see her. She is a tall blonde German woman with blue eyes and slight wrinkles around her eyesand mouth.
I’ve been at Saint Augustine’s Mental Health Hospital in Sardinia for barely a month, and if I wasn’t crazy before, I sure as shit am now. Every day is the same: sleep, eat, group activities designed for kindergartners, drugs, drugs, and more drugs. Drugs to help us sleep, to help us be calm, even drugs to enable us to take a crap. How does anyone get well in a placelike this?
“I told you: I was never unfocused,” I spit.
“I see,” she says condescendingly and scribbles something into her tablet.
“No, I don’t think you do, Doctor, or else you would tell them that I’m completely in my right mind and not a danger to myself or others and to let me the fuck go,” I argue. The look of murder I send her way doesn’t helpmy cause.
Unfazed, she just sighs and lays down her tablet. “We’ve been over this, Mrs. Marius–”
“Don’t call me that! That’s notmy name.”
“Fine. We’ve gone over this, Greta. I cannot in good conscience report that you’re stable enough to return to society when you still cannot see that what you think you went through was just a hallucination. Greta, you won’t even accept that you’remarried.”
“Because I’m not!” I shout and grip the edge of the suede sofa cushion to stop from launching myself at her. “I know what you tell me, but I’m telling you for the hundredth time, I do not know that man. You say I have hallucinations, but that doesn’t explain me not remembering a man I supposedly love so much that I married him within weeks of meeting him.”
“Your mind is blocking out––”
“Fuck you! You can stop with your psycho-babble bullshit. I know what’s real, and I’m done with this conversation.”
“Very well. Your husband… Mr. Marius,” she corrects, “will be here shortly to visit you. We will try again another day.”
Without another word, I stand and storm out of her office with a hard slam of the door. “Easy,Piccolo, you will shake the whole place down,” the male nurse, Diego, cautions, levity paintinghis tone.
“Good. Then I could get the hell out of this damn place,” I murmur and start walking toward themain hall.
“You wound me, little one. You wouldn’t miss me?” he asks in mock offense, and I can’t help but smile at the gentle giant. He is tall as a mountain, built like a lumberjack, with his broad chest, bushy beard, and deep brown eyes. The man is intimidating until you get to know him, and then he is just a giant teddy bear.
“You would be the only one I missed. You could always go with me, be my bodyguard. Just get me out of here.” I smirk up at the man.
“I’ll get right on that. For now, you have a visitor.” He guides me to the recreation room where family members sit with their institutionalized loved ones and pretend that they aren’t entirely creeped out by this place.
“Oh, joy. Someone else to try and make me feel nuts.”
“No matter what you believe, the man seems to care for you. There are worse things than a man loving you through this,” Diego argues, and I snort at his attempt at romanticizing thesituation.
We enter the room, and there he sits—my supposed husband. Tall, handsome, and imposing as hell. My pulse quickens, and the same cold chill I feel every time he visits climbs my spine. It’s a warning––of what I don’t exactly know.
As soon as his eyes meet mine, Sebastian smiles broadly and takes me in his arms. “Piccolo Uccello.” He calls melittle bird, something I’ve told him repeatedly to stop doing.
